The Dutch style in England was characterised by an emphasis on
parterres, topiary, water features, orchards and the planting of
avenues in the countryside(see fig 4). Little survives of London and Wise's executed work but
sufficient drawings exist to give an impression of their design
practice. It was more Dutch than French. Switzer described London
as 'superintendenet of their majesties' gardens and
director-general of most of the gardens and plantations of Great
Britain' , but in fact he and Wise were great designers of
parterres and only occasional designers of avenues and plantations.
The parterres were simple by French standards. They had water
features, statues and topiary but little 'embroidery' or
'scroll-work'. The avenues were occasionally formed by cutting
through existing woods but more often by planting lines of trees.
London's most important commissions were the gardens at Longleat and
Chatsworth. Both were dominated by
extensive parterres and had lines of trees projecting into
farmland. At Longleat there was also a small star of avenues. It
occupied a smaller area than the parterre and could not be compared
to a French hunting forest.

The best surviving example of London and Wise's work is at
Melbourne Hall in
Derbyshire. The garden at Melbourne Hall was made between 1696 and
1705 by Thomas Coke who also had a hand in its design. Almost half
the site is given over to a large parterre. The other part is
occupied by a grove of irregularly planned avenues which display a
taste for axial vistas but not the will to align them with the main
axis of the house and garden. As at Longleat the grove appears to
be as an addition to the layout rather than its main feature. The
parterre has now become a lawn which is marred by a variety of
specimen trees which have replaced London and Wise's
topiary.

Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire, designed by George London and
Henry Wise. From Triggs' Formal Gardens

Melbourne Hall

Henry Wise worked at Blenheim with
Vanburgh. The division of work
between the garden designer and the architect is not known but it
is likely that Wise designed the large parterre behind the house,
which has gone, and the single avenue in front of the house which
survives and is being replanted where necessary. In Kensington Gardens
Wise designed a series of parterres and a mount which have been
replaced by a modern 'Dutch garden'. There is another recent 'Dutch
garden' at Hampton Court in Richmond
but the large semi-circular parterre which Wise certainly
maintained, and may have designed, has been replaced by a grotesque
semi-circle of yew trees. It is also probable that Wise designed
the famous maze at Hampton Court. He became a rich man and retired
to a country house with a parterre and avenue garden at Warwick
Priory. The earthworks for the garden survive in a public park. The
Priory building was taken to America in the 1920s and the County
Records Office has been built on the site.

The painting of 'The south east prospect of Hampton Court in
Herefordshire ' by L Knyff gives a
better impression of London and Wise's work than any surviving
garden. The design has been attributed to London and is essentially
Dutch. Parterres flank the house on all sides and a canal with two
summer houses runs across the front of the garden. The avenues do
radiate from the house but they are clearly an afterthought and
have been made with lines of trees running through agricultural
land. They appear to lose all sense of purpose on reaching the
hills. The painting of Hampton Court by Knyff has a distinct
resemblence to the drawing of Sir William Temple's own garden at Moor Park in Surrey, which might have been
drawn by Kip or Knyff. Temple's garden was designed c.1680 and
named in remembrance of Lucy Harrington's house where Sir William
and Dorothy had spent their honeymoon in 1655. The description of
this garden in Temple's essay On the gardens of Epicurus is
the best written account of a garden in the Dutch style. Temple was
a protestant who admired the Dutch but hated the French 'upon
account of their imperiousness and arrogance to foreigners'.

The drawing of the Moor Park shows six large enclosures and
numerous sub-divisions. One of the enclosures is laid to grass and
was probably used for bowling. Three of the other main enclosures
at Moor Park are laid out as knots and parterres and the remainder
are used for growing fruit and vegetables. Some topiary can be seen
which takes the form of small pyramids and cubes of the kind which
were later ridiculed by Pope, who was a catholic with French
sympathies. The pleached lime walk and the canal at the bottom of
the garden are typically Dutch. On the left of the drawing a
serpentine stream can be seen wriggling in its efforts to enter the
garden. Hussey has suggested that the presence of this line
corresponds to Temple's famous remarks on the desirability of
irregularity in gardens.

Moor Park in Surrey, Sir William
Temple's own garden. Note the serpentine stream in the bottom left
corner - one of the earliest 'irregular 'features in an English
garden.

The river at Moor Park

The enclosed garden at Moor
Park

One of the main pleasures of Temple's garden was the dry gravel
paths which were so much more convenient to walk on than the muddy
unpaved public roads and country paths. The ladies of the house
could take the sun and air, safe from wild animals and brigands.
After the pleasure of watching the plants grow came the profit of
harvesting fruit and vegetables for the kitchen.

In his essay 'Upon the Gardens of Epicurus', Temple took a
Virgilian interest in fruit but says little about flowers and
explains his ommission as follows:

I will not enter upon any account of flowers, having only
pleased myself with seeing or smelling them, and not troubling
myself with their care, which is more the ladies part than the
men's.

Bacon's jest of 1625 that 'you can see as good
sights many times, in tarts' as you can see in knot gardens had
also made the point that the ladies were responsible for the making
the knots and cooking the tarts. Sometimes the patterns for knot
gardens were provided by the same tradesmen who supplied embroidery
patterns.

The contemporary books which dealt with flowers were known as
herbals and presumably belonged in the ladies' parlour rather than
the gentlemen's study. Herbs were essential for cooking and medical
care, and knowledge of them was a necessary part of a woman's
education. John Parkinson, the
author of the most popular seventeenth century herbal, was an
apothecary but gave more attention to flowers than his predecessor,
John Gerard. Parkinson also
illustrated some patterns for knot gardens which resemble
embroidery patterns.

The patterns which can be seen in the Temples' garden are of
intermediate complexity between the traditional knot garden and the
elaborate parterre de broderie as developed by Claude
Mollet and Jacques Boyceau. Temple does not say what flowers
were planted at Moor Park but many other contemporary accounts
survive and we can guess that Dorothy Temple's flower garden contained tulips,
crocus, polyanthus, gillyflowers (clove scented pinks and
wallflowers), roses, cornflowers, cyclamen, hollyhocks, jasmine,
lavender, pansies, poppies, rosemary and violets. The small plants
would be used in the knot gardens and the larger plants would be
placed against the walls and hedges.

There were no forest trees inside the garden at Moor Park, but
the avenues outside the garden are very significant. They project
outwards into the countryside and thus signpost the future
development of British garden design. A careful examination of the
avenues in Kip and Knyff's Britannia Illustrata reveals
that the practice of attaching avenues to enclosed gardens became
common in England. Very few of their drawings show a systematic
pattern of avenues radiating from a central point. Most are formed
by newly planted lines of trees which meet the walls of the
enclosed gardens at right angles. The birdseye viewpoint adopted by
Kip and Knyff makes these avenues look more radial than they would
appear on a a plan. Non-radial avenues of this type are shown on
the drawing of Dumbleton and were added to Ham House after the plan of the enclosed garden
was drawn in 1671.

Westbury Court, Gloucestershire, c1902 is the best example
in England of a Dutch canal garden.

The best surviving examples of
the Dutch style are the canal garden at Westbury Court, which is being restored,
and the topiary garden at Levens
Hall. Since the latter was designed by a Frenchman, Monsieur
Guillaume Beaumont, for a supporter
of the Stuart cause it illustrates the general confusion between
the French and Dutch styles. There is also an 'informal avenue' at
Levens Hall which reaches out into the landscape on undulating
ground.